October 2006

Now we’re up and running again. Nick has upgraded us to WordPress 2.0.4 and introduced a new and better spam filter. For better or for worse, this means that there are no more viagra or phentermine pills, mature babes, cheap boys or online poker games on sale in the comment section any more. Our in-house users/writers will also see a new screen interface which may take a few minutes to get accustomed to. Unfortunately the upgrade has removed our nifty icon (the gene chip-in-a-jar), but all this — and some better features — will be introduced stepwise in the next couple of weeks. Until then, continue to enjoy!

Th

Kulturnatten mindede mig om en gammel diskussion vi har haft igennem årenes løb — nemmelig, hvorvidt vi skal modernisere eller lade være. Måske er det sådan, at mange af vores besøgende kan lide stedet netop fordi det ikke er 100% tip-top istandsat og professionelt. Dvs. at de vender tilbage kulturnat efter kulturnat fordi huset bærer præg af forfald, spontaneitet og en god portion amatørisme hist og her.

Det kan man jo — hvis det er rigtigt — ærge sig over som gammel professionel perfektionist. Men samtidigt skal man nok ikke glemme, at forfaldet og det dilettantiske har en æstetik — og en attraktionskraft. For nogle uger siden påpegede turistorganisationen Wonderful Copenhagen i Berlingske Tidende at normaliseringen af Christiania vil medføre et tab for turistnæringen i København. Jo mere pænt og tilrettelagt Christiania bliver, jo mere mister Christiania sin autenticitet og tiltrækningskraft. Gælder detsamme Medicinsk Museion?

Medens vi går og venter på at fejre Rigshospitalets 250-årsjubilæum i 2007 — med jubilæumsbog af Anne Løkke, stor udstilling af Rikke Vindberg mm. — kan vi rette opmærksomheden mod et lidt mere ydmygt jubilæum. Direktionen for Hvidovre Hospital, et af Københavns regionale sygehuse, har fået lavet en film, “Hvidovre Hospital 30 år: bygget på pionérånd og entusiasme”, hvor man interviewer fem ældre læger og en oversygeplejerske (se her, 30 min) om bygningerne, organisation- og personaleforhold, samarbejdet mellem læger og sygeplejersker mm., fra åbningen i 1976 til i dag, med fokus på de første år.

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Since I began to follow the Boing Boing blog three years ago, I have seen thousands of pictures of peculiar gadgets and things in their posts. But only last week did I realise that this immensely popular blog is in fact subtitled “A Directory of Wonderful Things”! If Wikipedia is to be trusted, this has been the case since January 2000! So why did it take me three years to find out?

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Camilla has repeatedly pointed out in our discussions — see for example the minisymposium “Can today’s exhibitions learn from early-modern curiosity cabinets?” that we held with Camilla and Ken Arnold 27 September last year — that we can learn much from early modern museums when we are designing the Medical Museion — both collection- and exhibitionwise.

Here is yet another opportunity for learning how to do so, viz., the conference “Theatrum Scientiarum – Spuren der Avantgarde im experimentellen Wissen des 17. Jahrhunderts” arranged by the special research area “Kulturen des Performativen” at Freie Universität in Berlin. The conference is, very apropos, held at the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum an der Charité, 2 – 4 November 2006.

The programme looks absolutely wonderful (see below). Berlin is only a cheap Sterling.com or Easy-jet.com air-ticket away and you can find in-expensive lodging at the Berliner Zimmer Schokofabrik.
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I cannot really explain why I’m so fascinated with this eight-minute animation of molecular mechanisms within the cell? “The Inner Life of a Cell” was created for Harvard University biology students by XVIVO, a scientific animation company. Turn off the accompanying music-hall piano sound and enjoy the “slithering, gliding and twisting through 3D space”.

There are many other cell biology and molecular biology animations out there (see e.g., this on DNA replication, from 2003), but this XVIVO-Harvard product is good, I think, because, as Jim Endersby says, it’s like “Terminator 2 meets a biology textbook”. It’s both good animation and pretty realistic cell and molecular biology at the same time.

If you want an explanation of what goes on during the eight minutes, read this blog post — and for a discussion of the animation work behind it, read this article in Animation Magazine. The short movie raises a whole array of questions about how animation technology can be developed for visual representations of science for didactic and other display uses, and also questions about the interface between art, animation technology, cell biology and molecular design.
(thanks to Jim Endersby, Cambridge for an inspiring mail earlier tonight)

Intute, the internet service for education and research created by a consortium of UK universities, has just launched a very useful tutorial for historians to the internet. It is primarily written for general historians in the UK, but the general advices and the topics chosen can easily be transferred to other national contexts and to, e.g., medical history. It is especially useful for medical and public health students who want to write historical essays but spontaneously tend to be quite naïve in their use of internet information and sources. Intute have hundreds of similar tutorials for a large number of subjects across the disciplines. Enjoy!

The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology and Medicine: Writing Recent Science, edited by Ron Doel and myself has now been published by Routledge; see Amazon’s website and Routledge’s website. We are also setting up a special website for the book, which will hopefully be operating in a few weeks.
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The Wikipedia history of medicine article is probably not something I would like to give to my students to read. The quality of the auxilliary articles are also quite uneven. Some of them are really bad, e.g., that on the history of anatomy or the “article” on the history of immunology (my own specialty!) which is reduced to a simple list of chronological events.

But other articles are surprisingly informative, e.g., the article on the history of neuroimaging. And generally, the articles on recent biomedicine are much better than the articles on earlier historical periods — a tendency which supports the impression that Wikipedia is good in science and technology and bad (sometimes even awful) in the humanities.
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The Institute for the Unstable Media, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam-based Virtueel Platform are jointly organising a two-day event — a seminar and a workshop — on Thursday and Friday 9-10 November, on the theme of close-to-the-skin technology. See their website here.
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